Clinton

It was the summer of 1970, and the war in Vietnam was never going to end. B-52s were carpet-bombing Cambodia, gouging craters into its eastern hills; across the border, angry G.I.s were fragging their officers. Back home, radicals were bombing police stations and burning down banks. In May, the National Guard shot four students dead at Kent State. To paraphrase Yeats, things were falling apart; the center couldn’t hold.

Last week, as the Senate Democrats prepared to grill Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, Berkeley Law Professor John Yoo spoke to the Chronicle’s Joe Garofoli about what to expect from the proceedings.

Editor’s Note: This story was originally published in April 2006. Last week, John Perry Barlow—poet, Internet phlilosopher and activist, known for an eclectic resume and zest for life— died in his sleep after a period of ill health. California is reposting this story in light of that news.

Democrats are still stumbling around in the smoldering rubble of the 2016 presidential election, struggling to identify just what went wrong for them. Several theories are vying for primacy: voting fraud (or at least, inaccurate ballot counting), the Democratic Party’s disconnect with white working class voters, Trump’s bonding with the same, Trump’s uncanny tapping of surging nativist and xenophobic sentiment, the American susceptibility to celebrity, and Clinton’s bedrock weakness as a candidate.

Posted on November 28, 2016 - 3:59pm

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In One Man’s Search for Baseball’s Underdogs: Having been only an off-and-on baseball fan, I really enjoyed reading this article. When I first started going out with my now husband, we went to a lot of A’s games and what I...

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In Is ‘They’ Here to Stay?: I agree, the word “cool” is a great pick for word of the 20th century. “Media” to me is also a good candidate. Thanks for an enlightening read. Will look for the new podcast in the summer.

CALIFORNIA Classic

August Vollmer, the City of Berkeley’s first police chief and a pioneer of criminal justice classes at UC Berkeley, was an early voice on policing practices. He advocated for the hiring of black cops and extolled “scientific police work,” not rough justice. “Society needs and must somehow obtain truly exceptional men to discharge police duties,” he wrote. Vollmer may have naïve to think that police officers could be the enlightened übermenschen he envisioned, but he had a vision, one engendered by good intentions and an innate sense of social and racial equity.